eastern, 2017 commencement speeches. this weekend speakers include hillary clinton at wellesley college in massachusetts. president donald trump at liberty university in lynchburg, virginia. senator bernie sanders at brooklyn dplej new york. representative mia love. former u.s. deputy attorney general sally yates at harvard law school class day commencement in massachusetts. president and ceo of lieu let packer meg whitman and national institutes of health director francis collins at smu in dallas. saturday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span and c-span.org. >> at this year's annual meeting of the organization of american historians a panel discuss the legacy of woodrow wilson, including the decision to enter

world war i, the post war restructuring of europe and his opposition to civil rielgtsd. this is an hour and a half. jo good morning, everybody. i'm going to get started because we're at 9:00. i'm going to do this. i'm going to read you a paragraph just in case any of you actually wandered in and you can guess from that paragraph what this panel is about. it is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war torques the most terrible and disastrous of all wars. civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. the right is more pressures than the peace. we will fight for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority, for the rights and liberties of small nations by such a concert of free people's as shall bring peace and safety

to all nations and make the world yitd at last free. to such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have with the pride of those who know that the day has come where america is privileged to spend her glad and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and peace which she has treasured. god helping her, she can do no other. as you may have sir highsed in case you didn't already know, this is a panel on woodrow wilson's legacies, a panel put together by the society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era. we hope to spark a lively conversation. should you wish to cannot this kvrlgs or any other, please do join us for the shegay reception this evening from 5:00 to 7:00 on the fourth floor, balcony k.

i'm adrienne lynn smith i'm a historian at duke university. i'm going to introduce if panel in the order of the program. first mary ri b nda, pro federal reserve and chair at mount holy oak. a scholar of north american imperial information, histories of racism and cultural history, among others things, she's the author of a book. she's currently working on a book entitled entangled in the things of this world. mary lion. next, samuel shaffer. at st. alban's school where he teaches history and coach's football. he holds a b.a. from the

university of north carolina which it turns out is good at history and athletics. so he's probably feeling a bit smug right now. and a ph.d. in history from yale where people the end to be smug but for other respects, not you, of course, sam, and exempting others at this table. where he wrote a dissertation called woodrow wilson's nation and return of the south 1880 to 1920. next up, eric yellen associate professor or history at the university of richmond where he's won awards. professor yellen is the arthur of "racism." he's currently developing a new project that considers the political and social perceptions of the social security administration after world war ii. i'd like to point out that we

have very good teaching represented on this panel which when we consider how to get our work out to a public is, of course, one of the first linings of doing so. we also have two other presenters who are well versed in speaking to both scholars and publics. julian zell et ser from princeton university is co-editor of "politics in society" and the arthur of numerous books, articles and newspaper columns on the high politics of the united states. including two recent books. finally and featured, actually, is david green berg, professor

of history at rutgers university in new brunswick. he's frequently in the national news media. he specializes in american political and cultural history. his recent book, pluck of spin, an insider to the american presidency from the progressive era to the present. so please join me in expressing our enthusiasm and excitement for the panel. [ applause ] >> thank you so much and welcome. i come to you from the 1830s and 40s and return happily to this moment of the early 20th search little to which i will return. i made my way back to that

earlier moment because i have been thinking and wanting to be able to understand better something about the complexity of sovereignty and the connections between notions of sovereignty that bear on the ways we think of the self in the society and the political system and b sovereignty -- the sovereignty of nations and i've been interested in moments when someone stands up and says, it is possible to do more than we've done. it is possible to extend sovereignty farther. very much in the way that woodrow wilson did. but how in the course of making that attempt these moves towards sovereignty end up with great frequency, recapitulating the relations of power and the exclusions that vk vr have been in place. and i am will pleased to be here having us think about woodrow wilson and his legacies in this

moment when it is so important for us to be understanding and thinking maybe freshly about liberalism, what it is, what it has been, what its uses in power is, what its limits are and how we go forward with that in this particular moment. i am -- we're going to begin with some words from woodrow wilson in his campaign of 1912. i came to this in part thinking, let's look at how we bring together some of the questions about the international context, with questions about immigration and thinking about woodrow wilson, what he had to say about immigration in particular and how that comes together with his story of the history of the united states. so one of the statements that really stood out to me in looking back over the record of his policy and comments in this, looking back on the history of

the united states in 1912 in wilmington, delaware, wilson stated it has been the privilege and the pride of america to settle her own affairs without drawing a single tear or a single drop of blood from mankind. he said that in 1912. he of course did not yet know what he was headed into and the ways in which he would put to ice the united states marines in haiti and elsewhere. but to my mind, this statement of a kind of purity of america, a kind of innocent origin of the nation that has been maintained is central to the one of the problems we need to take up in relation to wilson. the idea of a purity that needs to be main tanld and of a nation that is uniquely devoted to

carrying forward the program of liberty without violence. in the same year a little bit earlier he -- in thinking about how the united states had come together from people's of europe and somewhat embroiled in difficulty because of statements he had made about immigration earlier, he was called on to clarify the record looking back again at the history of the united states states, he stated that the united states had set itself the task of setting up an asylum for the world. we have carried in our minds, he said, those men who first set foot upon america, those little bands who came to make a foot hold in the wilderness, because the great teaming nations they had forgotten behind had

forgotten what it was. so we set up an asylum. for whom? for the world. we are the trustees of the confidence of mankind in liberty. if we do not redeem that truts, if we are then most to be pitied for -- and this is what really most stood out here. the more glorious your dreams, the more contemptible your failure. i don't think the point, at least for me, is to reynoldser contempt here but for us to look at the relationship between the grand dreams that woodrow wilson set forth and the ways in which his understanding of sovereignty, his understanding of the kind of self that would make possible an american nation, an american project brought with it certain very clear limitations and allowed and even fostered kinds of violence that he himself imagined himself to be free of

and imagined the nation to be free of. the more glorious your dreams, the more contemptible your failure. also in that same campaign, he -- and again addressing immigration said the gord "american" does not express a race. it expresses a body of men pressing forward to the achievements of the human race. it's an intellectual venture to be an american. you've to the to have a mind that can adjust itself to many kinds of processes to be an american. here of course he was railing against the phenomenon of the hyphenated american. don't call yourself a hungarian american, a polish american, an italian american. call yourself an american. if you are two invested in the particular itself of your

identity and your place you will miss the project we are in, which is to recognize that the interests of any must be the interests of every man and i understand that in saying that, he was partly railing against the radicalism that sought in his view to foment interest and class interest that would be the undoing of the nation. but i think it's a very interesting idea for us to consider that notion that interests are -- if they are the interests of any, the interests of all an idea that will he set out in the process of rejecting that notion of hyphenated americanism. so it has been pointed out that waurnl went some distance toward insisting on a kind of pluralism that made up america, that america wasn't a racial essence

of an anglo saxon heritage. but he hailed that heritage as essential to the nation but it was something that could come together as we assem late to one another and achieve what it is for human kind to address. in the employees, he rejected the notion that some people could be assimilated into that project and was pushed in the course of this campaign to come out and make a very clear statement opposing asian immigration, opposing citizenship of japanese and chinese people, calling out the idea that these were peoples who were incapable of being assimilated to the nation and what's more, whose presence stood in the face of and called on the government to undertake its role to protect americans and workers from unfair

competition. and in doing so, so hold to the ideal of the nation. he said that -- am i at anaheim oh, my. ok. i'll say one or two more things. that -- and this is a quote -- n oriental cooleyism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson. so i thought i would be saying a bit more but what i want to emphasize here in some of the work on wilson, i think there's an interesting discussion about his shortcomings, was he too vested in honor, was he too stubborn and so forth? i think actually these become important questions when we ask about the ways that his individual character was actually linked with a much broader cultural disposition and question that his stubbornness, for example, on the issue of race, on segregation, on the

place of african-americans, that his stubbornness on a variety of questions got in the way of his achieving the full vision he had has been laid out but might that point us to some of the ways that the vision itself held a kind of arrogance about the project of america that needs to be interrogated in relation to international policy, in relation to immigration, and so much more and i will leave it there. that's a start to the conversation. thank you. [ applause ] >> that's fascinating to think about waurp and americanism, what it means to be an american at this point in time, i think. our panel was asked to think about and it emerged out of the controversies over the past year or two of wilson and his

legacies at places like princeton. i'm going to try to do a number of those things and start broad and end up narrow and floip ask some questions at the end. starting with the notion of the word "legacy," legacy technically is a gift or bekwooet. it's something in your will which provides intention ality. i think it's worth thinking about some of his unintentional legacies, things we see now that they may not have seen then. what is this gift or will that he's bekwooeted us? in short and not to go too much what most of us probably all know and heard when we were 16 and then again in college and so on, but wilson is without a

doubt one of the most significant domestic -- and significant presidents the united states has ever had. domestically his new freedom and the tariff and antitrust and the child labor act and the federal reserve, all these things are significant achievements. his activism as a president, being the first. to go and speak before congress since john adams. in going to congress many times more than any other president, i think, since even, working with congress in that sense and in many ways laying the groundwork for other activist presidents such as lyndon johnson. his leadership of the united states before and doing its entry world war i and of course his vision of a post war world.

as similars have pointed out more recently along with this good, there's also bad. and some have pointed out some of the darker side that went hand in hand with these great achievements of wilson's, the segregation of departments that happened under his watch. the exporting of racial imperialism that mary talks about, so that has come to light. it's been around for a while but more and more in the public eye recently. i'd like to take a few minutes to talk action i think about a related legacy of wilson that can speak to the good and the bad. wilson as a southerner gives us nor insight into his legacies. in a sense, thinking about how understanding his roots might better help us understand what

his legacies are and how those two aren't separated. how the good and the bad shouldn't be separated. so of course, wilson as a southern southerner has -- this has long been a subject of conversation -- and there's always this question. so yes, woodrow wilson left the south in his 20s. yes, he tried to get rid of his accent. yes, he wrote he was glad the confederacy lost and he was worried southerners would see him as too radical and yes, his constituting thinking was much broader than a simplistic states' rights theory. at the same time, he spent his formative years, first two decades of his life in the war in construction south. he told them south is one place

i don't need to be explained anything. he married a southerner. his cab knelt members closest to him, mmm mcadoo and others, they stayed in his administration almost the whole time. they were southerners. woodrow wilson carried with him a world view that had been shaped in the civil war and reconstruction south and it changed and shifted but i think it was always there. i'd like to give three specific examples of how being a white southerner shaped his legacy. first of all is his election, simply put. most americans in books talk about the elections of 1912. i teach high school and the textbooks talk about it as being an election.

americans at the time also ak nomd that the election of 112 was a moment of national reunion. there were 4e9dlines. the new york tribune said the induction of wilson seems national ties. there's articles about how the south is back with us. all these articles talked about this was the great thing about american democracy, that how a region had been in arms against the country was back. these are the great things about democracy. it can absorb a civil war. wilson, he said i would fayne believe that hi selection as president by the people of the united states means the final obliteration of everything that may have with divided sectionings of the country. he actually called himself an sbrumt of reunion. i think it had meaning to him and it had meaning to people at the time. at the same time for many white

southerners, it was a retoergs of the south and they saw that the south before the civil war had had this great power in the federal government, in some cases disproportionate power and they said the south is back in there. there are dozens of articles about -- talking about the south being in the saddle and what this means. five of his penn ten cab knelt members were born in the south. both houses of congress were held by the democratic party which had a part of leadership. so this leads us to the second point up want to talk about is the domestic effects of a southern administration on the new freedom. obviously, most obviously as my colleagues have pointed out, within the executive departments we see the segregation, right, by southern eers that in a sens

as the chicago defender noted, wilson's presence, he freed racism in washington, d.c. and actually called wilson the father of segregation. at the same time it's worth thinking about the new freedom in his practical sense. in how it was carried out. it was carried out by a southern born president working with a southern led congress 26789 congress of 1913, nine of the 12 committees were chaired by southerners. so wilson went to congress all those times, he was talking to men who had grown up in the south like him, many of them at the same time as him. in the tariff that's passed is the the antitrust act was pushed by the senator from alabama.

wilson's go between to congress was albert burleson, a longtime house member. so thinking about the south earner, how that affects the problem obligation of a new freedom. a final point is how southernness shaped his approach to world war i. he admitted when he came president he wasn't prepared for foreign policy. he said it would be an iran any of fate if my administration had to deal with a war. when he wrote about it in his text pooks. he wrote two best-selling textbooks and learned two lessons. he learned what happens when the victors foist harsh terms on the vanquish. he writes about disastrous, humiliation and destruction and rain rein of ignorance.

he talks about african-americans being put in charge. and so in a sense it's worth thinking about his approach through that lens. i'm not saying there weren't other factors. there were many other factors. he said visibility would be the terms imposed upon the vanquished. it would leave a sting and a bitter memory, those are the exact same words he uses in his description about how southerners felt during reconstruction. and when he proposes a league of nation with a mariner date system which says that there will be a determination but that several of the former colonies will be under the duty yaj of europeans. how they needed the tutelage of white southerners.

so i think thinking about his roots may better help us understand those legacies. in a sense, thinking about the legacy of woodrow wilson, in a sense as the legacy of the reconstruction. legacy of reconstruction as understood by a white southerner in the importance of historical memory by him can help shape how we think about our ownful historical memory. think of it as a piece. in a sense that's what makes it more interesting. if he were just good, that wouldn't be true. as a teacher when i'm trying to explain american history and get my students to understand what history is and what humanity is, that if we have a leader that is flawed, that actually when we talk about his flaws, it brings both into greater focus and

helps understand the motivations and the roots of historical acts and the humanity involved in what we teach. so i find teaching about woodrow wilson incredibly fulfilling and incredibly powerful. so thank you. [ applause ] >> thanks. that was -- that's perfect for what i want to do. i don't want to rather than give the eight-minute version of my book, i thought i would back up and in some ways play the role of provocateur. i'm going to start in february of 2004. so in that eight months, african-americans in southern maryland remembered woodrow wilson. the woodrow wilson bridge over the potomac river connecting prince george's county, to

alexandra, virginia -- an antebellum old town complete are robert e. lee lajd marks. the 45-year-old bridge was being rebuilt and the montgomery county director of public works and transportation and a daughter of a federal government worker requested that the medallion bearing wilson's image, if you've driven over the bridge you've seen them on both sides. they're about this big. she asked that the medallion be left off the maryland side. the medallions remained on both sides of the bridge, as you know, but the surprise with which white people responded to his request, this is in newspapers, in maryland, in washington. ungds lined for me the different memories woodrow wilson can evoke. he's most famous for work in

versailles and in world war i. he's also famous in loosing it all in the end. characterizations of his flaws, dorthy ross has written "all have described the qualities of his personality chiefly responsible for his failings in paris, as overconfidence, egotism, faith in his own judgments and powers and adherence to his principles, combined with ambition and desire for power. not the most positive characterization. yet, despite this, the history written almost entirely by white scholars reveals a strange insistence on lauding his intentions and motivations and i think a refusal to fully reckon with his impact and with the narrow range of speerchs, knowledge, and personal interactions that are he brought

to his work in the white house. this leads to a series of kind of do you altis and excuses. wilson loved black people. it's just that he was a southerner. he rmd women. with it was just that he was so victorianian. he was a good doctor but he was such a passionate lover and he felt bad able to. he was an internationalist. he just didn't think that included haiti or much in the world yould europe. he was stubborn but he was articulate and he got so sick. now, i do not pretend to hold the only rational view of wilson, either. i confess that my time studying the experiences of individual black civil certificate panthers vants has made it zif for me to fully honor wilson's progressive achievemen achievements. so that raises a question for me and perhaps for the round table

which is what do we mean when we talk about woodrow wilson. do we need the man -- mean the man and the man alone? do we mean by his legacies? legacies for whom? these questions always arise in the histories of presidents and other leaders. yet i see a search unwillingness to merge the insites. the -- the two leading bog first have written articles calls "the case for wood road wilson." when we view wilson and find ourselves making excuses for a man wlooz flaws should give us pause. perhaps it was wilson's position in the academy or as the founder of our discipline -- i don't mean to get too psychoanalytic -- perhaps it is

sympathetic for the causes that swept him into office, programs it's his knack for memorable phrases. his many bog first have argument that the only fair assess jchlts is that the good of the man outweighed theed bad. defending wilson to make this claim, the good outweighed the bad. these claims contained some eloquently stated disappointment in wilson's racist failings, but they're always just that. i want to echo a claim that sam made. always just that. failings. not of a piece with who the man was, what he accomplished or the progressive politics he hemmed to popularize. to me, its feels a little odd to call it the descendants of black civil certificate haven't or haitians or journalists or kong

schenn shus b objectors and they will them, well, the good outweighed the bad. in 2006 article it was asserted that racial hierarchy was at the root of wilson liberalism. i think we're just beginning to interrogate liberalism in the terms he suggests. in any case, i don't think the role of the historian is to keep the accounting she'll. add the columns, give the thumbs up or the thumbs down. taking a page from work on jefferson, i think we need a human view of woodrow wilson. i have to wonder, looking at the scholarship as a whole, might we be all too willing to weigh the importance of the federal reserve against the segregated lives of black americans or the

worthiness of democracy in europe over imperialism in the caribbean. wilson's black on america's black middle class matters. nothing should overwhelm this truth. wilson not only unleashed his administration loaded with white supremacists but i argue he provided a critical language for institutional racism. bureaucratic r efficiency, majority. fricti frictionlessness. this will connects the late 19th century white supremes si to our current. . this should not balance our fact out of our hiftsz. thanks. [ applause ]

>> good morning. so i feel i've been thinking about this as one who teaches in the woodrow wilson school since the moment my student stood up, some of them orderly, in orderly princeton fashion in the back walked out on a day that triggered the protest and the debates which are in part where this conversation is coming from. so woodrow wilson has reappeared on the national stage and some of the debate has been this is he good or is he bad debate. some of has been about how we think of his legacy. i'll just throw out for the purposes of the round table what i've been thinking a little bit about, what are some of the policy changes that take place during this period that continue to resonate but continue to shape the way we think about american politics to this day.

the first is the question about liberal internationalism. i think this is a place where many people start the discussion of the legacies of this administration. obviously toward the end of this presidency, woodrow wilson laid out a conception of how the united states should interact with the world that revolved around the central ality of international institutions and alliances. and up think as some of the panelists have said the limitations of his vision both politically here in the united states and the limitations of how it played out were well documented, but the basic principle is something that we have been coming back to again and again since that period. so the importance, the centra l

centrality would be for me legacy number one. two would be in an era today when we hear talk of deconstructing the administrative state, a term which probably most people didn't think would come out of white house circles, kind of steven sceronic's language put into the oval office and turned around used in different ways by steven. i do think this is the period in american political history where a move and confidence in the administrative capacity of federal institutions is one of the notable parts of the wilson administration. and when this debate broke out about the role of race, which i will get to, for me, this was always something that i had focused on when discussing woodrow wilson. the amount of institution building that takes place during his presidency is quite remarkable.

from the creation of the progressive income tax and the motion that we could administer a system lining this both in war and peace on a permanent basis so the beginning of coordinating and centralizing our banking system through the federal reserve, through new regulations on the economy like the creation of the ftc, i think the period of institution building that takes place during this period is quite central and sets up some of what we will see with other presidencies. third, and this is something i think that might be harder to place in this day and age, but woodrow wilson believed in partisan governance. so when there have been called in washington since the 1940s that we need a system where parties are stronger, where

there's more coordination between the party of the president and the party in congress, woodrow wilson and the book of congressional government is always the model that is referred to. and when wilson worked with the southerners in congress and when wilson appeared with congress, he wasn't only trying to introduce a more active presidency, but hoe believed we needed a system more like the parliamentary systems of europe. parliamentary systems of europe. he believed that american government was too fragmented. he believed that the parochial interests of congress often overwhelmed the national interest that parties could put on the table. and during the 1950s and '60s when reformers tried to move beyond the divided party system that we had of southern democrats and northern democrats and mid western republicans and liberal northeastern republicans, it was a wilsonian

idea that ultimately partisanship was good. and that we needed to create rules and institutions where parties could have a stronger hand in decision-making. and i think this was a key idea of woodrow wilson, and what's amazing when you study his presidency, is how much he tried to act that way. he didn't mind the perils and ugliness of partisanship and ultimately believed it was a mechanism to get more policies through our disjointed political system. and today we wrestle with that. i think today we see the negative sides of that, and we're talking about ways in which that might go too far. but i think that is one of the important legacies of both him and his presidency. a fourth one, which i'm sure we'll talk more about is the risks of the war-time presidency. this is something many people in

this room have written about. michael cason sitting in the back has written lots about this. but it's hard to disentangle his presidency from the more coercive aspects of the state that take form during world war i, from the stifling of dissent to the violation of civil liberties, to the sometimes unnecessary expansion of government that we see, into surveillance and information. i think the way in which the war-time presidency moves in this direction needs to start with what happened when this president went to war. and finally, let me come back to the question where it started, which is race and the presidency. i think this is more, this debate about wilson, it's more than about wilsonian liberalism. this taps into a bigger debate that historians and scientists

have been having about liberalism in the pre-1960s period. i think there has now been a significant and critical mass of scholarship that have shown that liberalism, before the 1960s, from the early 20th century, to the 1960s, was built on this racially divided political system. that the deal with the southern democrats to avoid forms of liberalism that really interfered and unsettled the racial order of the south, was a fundamental and defining characteristic of liberal politics until the civil rights movement started to bring this to a close. and i think the mistake of focusing too much on woodrow wilson, and focusing too much on his presidency was, it almost takes it out of focus. of where liberalism was during these decades.

and there were obvious reasons for this. they weren't only about him being a southerner. but they were also about the character of congress, where the southern democrats retained a firm hand and firm control over the legislative process through the committee system that's in place until the 1960s. and i guess my response was always when the wilson debate started, not to focus too much on him, but what scholars like or nelson and lieberman have been writing about which helps makes sense of some of the dualities of the administration. or these two parts of the progressive era, that really can't be seen as separate anymore. so the debate that we had about wilson was really a debate and a tougher look at the character of american liberalism before the

1960s. so all of these are just a few parts of the legacies of woodrow wilson, but more important, the legacies of american politics, in the early 1900s and 1910s they argue and believe are not only important for historians such as ourselves trying to understand this moment, but have been recurring themes in the political development of the united states since that time right through our day today. thank you. [ applause ] >> okay, thank you all. my panelists, my colleagues, have done such a thorough job in covering so many aspects of wilson's legacies, i hope i don't sound repetitive, redundant, in covering what i have to say today.

i want to echo, to be the first point of redundancy, points that sam and others made about the sort of futility of thinking about this as good outweighing bad, or bad outweighing good, of somehow quantifying, you know, and tallying up these different legacies, contributions, and arriving at some formula. i'm often asked to do these surveys of ranking all the presidents and woodrow wilson usually ends up somewhere in the top ten in the casey kasem school of presidential history. you know, i think he's, for all the very important challenges and new questions that are being asked, you know, that's probably about where he belongs. but these things are such silly measures, it's much more interesting, i think, as maybe eric said, to think of the human

wilson, take him in all, and to see all of these pieces of him as part of a single individual. to come to the question of legacies, i see many of the same ones as most prominent that have been mentioned. i think, i don't think that anyone stressed quite the importance of the strong and activist presidency that wilson, along with peter roosevelt before him, fashioned, that really is so much a part of our political landscape today that we kind of can't think otherwise. you know, i often tell my students, you know, to try to name some of the greatest achievements of the presidents before teddy roosevelt and woodrow wilson, and not only can they not name the achievements, they can't name the presidents. and that's not a coincidence. the presidency was understood as a very different office in the system. it's article 2 of the constitution, not article 1,

which was congress. the washington press corps such as it is, when it covered politics in washington, you know, pre-roosevelt, pre-mckinley, didn't go to the white house, there was no press room, no press secretary, no press releases for them to get. they went to congress to the galleries and don richie has written wonderfully about the 19th century washington press corps and its real focus on congress. so that shift in what the press covered was in part a reflection of the shift in the importance of the presidency that t.r. and wilson sort of together have to be seen as inaugurating and have fundamentally changed, you know, permanently thereafter. it's impossible, i think, to imagine going back to a system where the president isn't central to the political order in washington. and along with the strong and activist presidency comes the public presidency. to use another term from the

political scientists, a presidency that's actively engaged in sounding out public opinion, in trying to divine public opinion, and wilson, as a political theorist, had a theory of this, and his view was not that the president imposes his vision, not that he simply follows public opinion, but that there's a kind of dialogue, and that it's a theory particularly well suited to someone like wilson, who had great gifts of intlekz and articulateness and able to analyze what he was hearing. but he described it as sort of taking out the soundings, these inchoate soundings that would come out of public, fashioning it into what he took to be this common interest, again, i share the view that wilson saw the importance of a common good, a common interest, as so many progressives did, over factional, you know, pieces of coalition. and then conveying that back in his own language, and getting

support from the public through his rhetoric. and so wilson, as the great speech-maker, the one who moved people to tears with his rhetoric, this actually performed a very important function in his view of political leadership. the second piece that is not unrelated to this, that i think is wilson's great legacy, second or third piece, depending how you're counting, is the legacy of what we typically call progressive achievement. i think in times like ours and even, say, during the obama presidency where we have seen how hard it is for presidents to really accomplish a lot, that there are so many constraints even on the strong activist presidency that t.r. and wilson left us with that one has to appreciate all the more of those rare periods where a hell of a

lot it was accomplished and there have been there were. wilson, along with tr, fdr and lbj. and in the last sweep, those are the periods and therefore the presidents who sort of go down as, you know, having fundament mallty shaped our economic life, social life in dramatic ways of reform. third, there is no question, i think that the liberal internationalism that wilson helped to develop, you know, remains an important legacy. during the bush years, there were those who i think wrongly sort of tried to see the bush knee you conservative knee you policy as an expressionism of wilsonism, which i thought was crude. you see it much more with a

donald trump presidency who, you know, has come in basically declaring an end to the post '45 world order. there is a wonderful op ed piece right around the transition period where he laid out the system of rules and institutions and policies that have -- that presided for the last 70 years that really was in some ways belated wilson legacy, a wilson legacy conveyed through f.d.r., but the world order we lived with quite successfully for so long. it should not be forgotten he won the noble peace prize for this vision. he was recognized at the time for that. there is a few other points i could respond to in what some of my colleagues have said, which i'll try to do just very

briefly. i think it is important to think about wilson as a northerner, as well as a southerner. do we think about barack obama as a product of hawaii or a product of chicago? well both. but more i think chicago. wilson's experiences in new jersey politics, fighting the political machines, he really did change significantly and in particular i think his views on race, while he always retained the racism of the south, he was not -- i mean, he was actually quite different from, you know, the ben tillmans. he was not a fiery racial dem my gog on this. he can be seen as a figure who helped lead the transformation of the democratic party away from its sort of southern core, which it very much was in his

time. and which of course also accounts for the fact that he appointed so many southerners and southern reactionaries like burlson to the cabinet. for him not to have done so would be like for a democratic president today not to appoint a cabinet filled with women and people of color. i mean, it would be unthinkable. that's where the party was. so wilson in some ways was a product of his party in that time. finally, the last comment i'll make about this question of liberalism is wilson was part of a project where liberalism was changing. i'm in the middle of reading a wonderful new book by brad snyder called "house of truth." he's a legal historian. it's about litman and felix frank furtherer and a lot of intellectuals who were seeking to define the liberal principles

about civil liberties and free speech that come out of the world war i period but were still sort of germ nating during this period of the 19 teens. so it is important to think of these legacies and wilson's legacies of those of what was in transition and what was being borne and what was being developed rather than simply as a kind of static menu of policies that we can examine and either, you know, pass approval or rejection upon. so i'll end my remarks there and look forward to the conversation. thanks. [ applause ] >> there are many things that we could continue to say to one another or places where i am tempted to chime in, but i think the responsible thing for me to do as moderator of this panel would be to open up to the

conversation to y'all and see where you'd like to chime in. this is the firsthand i saw there. >> i was just wondering if the panel might comment on the conversation on the issues of racism, specifically northern congressmen. wilson comes to the presidency at a time of a great migration. oftentimes we focus on the racism that we hear from the floor of the congress from southern congressmen and senators. i'm just wondering about the complicity of northern congressmen in this period. >> could you identify yours, by the way? >> my name is russell. i'm from honolulu, hawaii. >> i'm sorry. you're looking at me. >> you wrote the book. >> so two things. briefly. one is that -- so martin was a congressman from illinois whose

district was becoming blacker and blacker by the day in this period, right? so he's on the district committee hearing bills to segregate washington, d.c. transportation and it's madden and a number of his northern colleagues who block that. washington, d.c. is never legally segregated in transportation. it's segregated through housing but mostly through covenants and red lining machinery that gets built in this era. there are congressmen who essentially block the full agenda that tillman and others think is going to finally arrive with wilson. the other thing i would say is that on the other hand the republican party at this point is completely complicit in diseven fran chment.

republicans can become a national party by bringing in white southerners rather than having african-americans in t south be their representatives. so the party as a whole i think is complicit in removing african-americans from the body of politic. and when harding and coolidge show up, they don't challenge the standard anymore. but the migration is putting pressure and will lead to the first black congressman from chicago. this is happening, but enough to overwhelm the seniority that democrats have to chair panels and to chair committees that will go on through into the roosevelt administration. >> that's the key, the weight of power in congress was, you know, moving and continuing to be in the hands of the southern democrats. so i think there is complicity well beyond the southerners. and this will become clear throughout the 20th century,

when there is northern backlash as much as southerners. but at this moment the southerners have the cards. but i think that was pretty fundamental to the process, to the way seniority was starting to really shape the leadership ladder of the chambers. >> this was actually the secondhand i saw, and then we'll go to -- >> i wonder if a legacy of woodrow wilson isn't -- you know, that he created an ideological core nucleus within the democratic party for modern liberalism because the person he had -- the big man he had to deal with was william jennings ryan. without the transition, the democratic party would have been more of a pop list party, and i don't think of woodrow wilson as

a populist. i think that's an important transition that would influence people like franklin roosevelt and many of the people who had been in the -- connected somehow with wilson who were then part of the new deal. i didn't phrase it as a question, but could you react, please? >> i think that that's pretty accurate. and, in fact, wilson is one of the people, along with some of these others like litman and fra frankfurter. some people say it is because the republicans kind of came to own progress i have. so they need to differentiate. but it was a new vision of liberalism. and especially i think ironically the backlash during the war gave further strength to a more robust civil libertarian

that we see coming out of the war. so and i think wilson fits that bill and we do see it by the '20s and the scopes brian is on the reactionary sort of things. so there is a real change. >> i want to chime in that it is a liberalism that is still steeped in the national politics of white supremacy, right? one of the things that i think comes out of mary's comments and -- and in some ways erik's comments on this panel and from yesterday that the liberal subject is a rationalized subject in ways that are not acknowledged which then makes to claiming against particularism ironic, right? >> can i just chime in? i do think the liberalism of the

f.d.r. era, that is different than what you see under woodrow wilson. i mean, i think there are some fundamental changes that will take place with the cio, with the wagner act that we know that it's still different in character than where the democratic party was in the 1910s. and it's important, i think, to keep that -- keep that a bit in mind. and that will define a lot of the character of liberal politics at least through the 1970s. >> i want to just add to that, that i think -- i think part of the legacy is that he mastered in his -- >> there you go. >> thank you. i think part of the legacy is that he mastered in his remarkable ability to craft language a kind of coded racism where he insisted on the universal, but in ways that consistently coded a set of

relationships around race. and in a way, what has evolved over time has been a struggle over that universal language. on the one hand, it enables people to call on it and insist on something more than what was intended. on the other hand, it continues to function as a rejection and a refusal to acknowledge the relations of white supremacy that wilson was also working to institutionalize. >> i just want to add very quickly on this one. and that was not unique, of course, to progressivism. this was something progressivism learned from the early republicanism of the early republican, of the whigs, the sort of classlessness rhetoric of the whigs and the common interest. so this idea of a common interest, a common good that sort of superceded the

particulars was one that the progressives, t.r. and wilson included, shared. but it was not at all, you know, peculiar or unique to them. >> i just want to say, a telling story is the career of a funder of the naacp, sort of has a what we could recognize as an early racial liberalism at the turn of the 20th century. and over the course will drop race and focus almost entirely on labor and passivism. i think there is something that happens in the teens that just allows liberalism to drop that issue. its reconstruction finally goes into the past in some ways. although; not how we think of the threat of government. but race can just become -- we can embrace a color blind labor based liberalism that doesn't have to trumpet its white supremacy as it maintains it. >> i have seen these two

consistently. i am going to call on them and then i am going to move over here. >> yeah. -- in germany. and there is self-promotion published in the first german language of woodrow wilson in 50 years. and this is also i might change the subject a little bit. but i'm surprised that no one has talked about the international legacy of woodrow wilson. woodrow wilson was the first global president. he was a superstar when he came to europe and he left tremendous disappointment. and this -- i think his role in shaping the way that the united states and american foreign policy in the 20th century and beyond has been perceived internationally cannot be overrated. there's still sort of in a

subterranean way in germany memory what i consider the myth of wilson's treason and that he is basically responsible for the second world war and all the rest of it. and other nations think of -- italy may have similar stories. i understand that would be probably the subject for a different panel, probably sponsored by schaffer rather. but nevertheless, i wanted any of the panelist might want to speak to that. >> i'll begin by saying that i see these as very much of peaks. in other words, the ways in which wilson negotiated questions of race in the domestic context have everything to do with the program that he pursued in europe. the fact that he could speak to audiences in the united states and talk about the asylum that the united states offered to whom to the world, meaning all

along the european nations and european immigrants, never meaning there to refer to asian immigrants, for example, is of a piece with his extraordinary statements and goals and rhetoric about self-determination for small nations, which then, of course, were -- was not -- he didn't intend the way that that was then taken by various people around the world who called him to say -- called on him to say, yes, and what about us and no. so the great disappointment that followed is very relevant. but this is of a piece with making a broad -- putting out a broad vision that is ostensively universal and much more specific in the way it carries forward domination. so the mandate system would carry forward a kind of program that rejected the language of

colonialism. but carried it forward in very important ways. >> the disappointment also points, i think, to some of the limitations of presidential power, which are very evident with him because on the one hand he is clearly -- he and t.r. were these models for the activist president on the international stage you see that very vividly. but at the same time with the league of nations, it's kind of early reminder of the continued power that congress will wield as well as other political pressures and political institutions throughout the century. so it wasn't simply his failures or his own limits. but as he himself was always cognizant since his studies as a political scientist were that the boundaries that this activist presidency was going to have to confront for the rest of the century. >> maybe i could just follow up for a moment with that to say that the vision of sovereign

states like the vision of a sovereign populus is fuounded o a notion that the state is defined as recognizable, as having integrity when it meets certain conditions. and so that frame work has always allowed for the notion of failed states and for an idea that the international system rests on somebody recognizing some states as legitimate and others as not. and i think that's a parallel between the domestic and international context. >> because wilson thought that certain people were capable of making defined states and certain people weren't, yeah. >> right. >> from washington, d.c. i was intrigued by very little mention of women and suffering. but i was particularly interested on your emphasis on

wilson's partisan ship because alice paul was criticized for being so naive to think that she could press suffrage only through republicans and the irony is it's republicans in 1918 that take other both houses and defeat him domestically and internationally. so again more comment than a question. but i'd be interested if any of your research touched on women. >> well, i will say about that that i do think that wilson's perspective was -- that wilson was very invested in a certain idea of what it meant to be a citizen that was fundamentally male and fundamentally a program for men that his vision of a nation crafted out of the

broth brotherhood of different peoples, all white men. but the gender piece of that was fundamental and that that created one of a number of kind of blocks on his vision. >> i mean, it should be added that, like a good politician, he changes. you know, we call it a flip-flop today, but his coming to support it sort of quite vigorously toward the end showed his recognition of changing times as well. he was -- he relinquished his earlier opposition and came to support it enthusiastically at the end. >> what leads to the flip-flop, right, is that wilson becomes convinced this will not change the character of women, right, so that they can still become sort of -- women as he

understands women to be, mostly his wife and daughter, daughters, you know, as good sort of respectable women who will still fulfill their duties while doing this other thing that politically he has to give them, right? [ inaudible ]. >> very quickly went from theodore roosevelt to woodrow wilson and went from theodore roosevelt to woodrow wilson twice. and i spent the last nine years of my life working on the fat man. and i was -- well, as a matter of fact justice brewer said that president taft was so nice and gentlemanly that on a streetcar he gave his seat to three women. that's true, by the way. that's really not my -- that's

really not my point. i want to make three quick facts or a statement of facts to you. the first is -- this was after wilson had nominated him, after he ran for presidency. the second fact is that under taft more antitrust suits were furnished. and the third fact is that in terms of conservation, which roosevelt stood for and antitrust and trust busting, taft set aside more land than roosevelt ever did. now, why do us, why do we as historians have blinders that the end to skip from someone like roosevelt to someone like wilson, ignoring the thing in the middle? i would just point that out to

you. >> i would say, look, there is many reasons for this. some are a political memory in which presidents we will categorize as innovators. part of it is this whole project, whether you are talking about poll -- these polls we get for who are the best presidents so simply a focus on credit and innovation on particular presidencies. you know, one of the great things about what some political scientists like nelson polls also wrote about, which taught me a lot, was just how different policy changes don't take place with any single presidency. they usually take place over decades with different actors pushing for issues from members of congress who are entrepreneurs on a certain question to activists and social groups who are creating pressure, waiting for the right moments. and then different presidents usually are any issue. it is like all the scholarship

on hoover that rediscovered some of the stuff that would become part of the new deal, you see how this gradually builds. so my point is part of this even the nature of the panel, which it's a great panel. i'm glad i'm on it. but when we have these legacies and good or bad or what happened when, i think we often get into a debate that won't be answered satisfactorily. that's not how policy making works in washington. it is over years. it is incremental and it is usually through various presidential administrations. >> and let me add a couple things to that because i think there are also legitimate reasons that taft isn't sort of in the pantheon in the same way. for one thing, he was a one term president. and that, you know, is generally a mark of, you know, if not failure. also nongreatness sort of in the

way we look at these things. there were ways in which you could make the case he was more progressive than t. rmt. you could argue the reverse on others. and when they ran against each other in 1912, there was little doubt that t.r. was seen as the one who was embodying a more radical progressivism. so i think taft's reputation as the conservative relative to t.r. and also relative to wilson in 1912 stems to how they were framed and positioned in that race based -- you know, largely on taft's record of governance. and finally taft explicitly rejected the theory of activist presidential governance that roosevelt articulates in his auto buy yog gra fi and has a very different conception of what a president should do. he's more modest and reluctant

to endorse a kind of full throated theory of the presidency. and i think -- i think that has sort of also shaped the way he's been understood. and, you know, his -- his name, i learned, my favorite piece about his girlth is that his name is an an know gram for a word with all, i'm fat. do with that what you with. >> these things don't happen with singular presidents. but i'm all in favor of bringing taft back because it is 1906 and taft gives a speech in the south as a republican arriving in the south and saying we can leave particular social issues to the local. and i think that's a critical term for the republican party in terms of thinking about republican party's investment in social policy that will affect african-americans. and it's taft that will lead that. roo roosevelt will follow when he runs later and then harding and

coolidge will pick that up. it's not until the 1960s until this really will shift but there is a retreat from social policy and an endorsement of the local that taft was really important. >> i hear in the last two questions an echo of the way that eric framed his talk, which is what do we talk about when we talk about woodrow wilson. and i'd say that one of the reasons that some things come up or that i sense some things come up or that we ultimately go back to particular sort of streams of discussions and not others is that for all of the vitality and intellectual vibrancy of things like women's history or african-american history or ethnic studies, there is a way in which intersectional analyses when we're talking about presidents or legislatures or policies or what have you are

still not fully viewed within our discipline as truly being political history. right? so we can talk about those in some venues, but if we're going to have a panel on presidents or presidential history, those things are going to get sub low mated in a more visceral things. that is my conjecture. dr. romano? >> my question may relate to that. i was very interested where the panel started and where it seemed to come from which is current controversies over things being named after woodrow wilson. and i thought it was interested that no one took a position. i do historical memory and i want to pose a question to woodrow wilson scholars here. what i have heard here about woodrow wilson is we shouldn't reduce him to a caricature. we need to put him in historical context. liberalism is a racial project.

he's representative of a larger political culture. all true. historians like to make things complex. commemoration likes to make things simple. it is celebration. it is honoring this person. so i'm wondering what do you say to the students who walk out of the center? what do you say to when i was, you know, maybe 2006 students did a protest at our local middle school, which was woodrow wilson middle school and they asked the faculty to say come and support us in walking out of our middle school because we are named after a rayist, right? many middle schools are named after racists, but who do we want to celebrate in our culture. so what would you say and i'm sure you have all been asked on some shows, should we continue naming these after wilson and why do you think he's become such a lightening point symbol given the complexity of what you've laid out here, what is he being reduced to and why woodrow wilson is becoming that

lightening rod? >> well, i'll start, i guess. i mean, i have the ended to take a position on most -- i wouldn't stay all of these renamings as sort of the wrong way to sort of address our history. because to your phrase its, reduces these figures, whether it's wilson or jackson or others to, you know, take the worst thing they did and find this deplorable and then to say, then, therefore, you know, we can't commemorate or respect or admire in any ways. i was listening to npr and john hockenbery, one of the more would be opinion non npr. this is what we're coming to? like that's all that you have to

say about franklin roosevelt? you know, there are certainly times when a reassessment or renaming is called for. i think, you know, the yale's handling of the calhoun issue the second time around was artfully done. but you go to europe and there is monuments of that pole yan. there are all these monarchs that did all these bloody terrible things and they are still up and standing and nobody thinks we are there for blessing all of their worst deeds by continuing to have that history as part of our sort of public life. so i think it's -- there is something a little bit wanton and, you know, almost jacket thin in the let's take the names off, let's level. the better ways to go are to expand. so i think this is what

princeton is doing. you have more of a plaques, more information giving a sense of who woodrow wilson was, why the school was named for him, good, bad, complex, that that more edge kaytive method is much better than the index of who's got to go. >> i actually -- i found it personally difficult as this unfolded. and i didn't have a clear answer. i spoke as a professor, not as princeton. my instinct was that the renaming wouldn't have the kind of effect that even the students were hoping for. my instinct was and it is still to some level, it is difficult once we start down that process with figures whose major purpose wasn't simply racial segregation or anti-semitism or sexism, figures out who we're taking off, who does it mean to leave someone else who did things that we don't like today while taking

this name on, isokay? you go into the richard russell building, the rern who filibustered against the civil rights bill. so there is many paths we can take. on the other hand, i did learn from the students from the protest who spoke about what is the necessity now that we know this, now that we know this aspect that eric has written about of keeping the name because it does mean something to walk into the school and now that we know that see the name. so i mean i still lean toward i would prefer when something like this comes out to inject funds into a kind of serious scholarly investigation into the problems of race that continue with us today or to use it in that

direction. but i guess i -- just as a personal story, i walked out feeling more uncertain by the time the debate ended. i think a lot of students had again winly good points, coming from a good place trying to figure this out. >> are we going down the line? >> one more thing, but i'll let you go first. >> i just want to add two things. one is that i think he's a lightening rod because i thought what the student did was brilliant in terms of using wilson to raise a much bigger issue, which is i think a failure at universities to -- to think about the difference between access and inclusion, right? and so that, you know, places like princeton with their incredible financial aid have managed to become somewhat accessible, but not inclusive. and i think that was the larger point students wanted to make, that this is not a comfortable place to be black. and it wasn't and it isn't and

it won't be for a while. and so i think that's the lightening rod. that's why. and i think the question for how to meet that is i took a lesson from how georgetown has been dealing with its issues because what i saw in georgetown's response, this is the issue that they are financially viable today because it sold people. what i saw in georgetown's response i think wisely was going back to its roots and thinking about what does it mean to respond to this issue, this crisis as a catholic institution, what does it say about us? and institutions are going to have to respond to these questions by soul searching and thinking about who are we, what is it we stand for and the values. i don't think i saw that at princeton or maybe we did. i mean, maybe this is who princeton is. i'm also ambivalent about removing names. i actually decided to split the baby and say you should remove the name from the dorm because

this is where people live and this is their home. but i think it is a much bigger issue of what does the institution stand for, for whom does it exist and what happens there, what kind of container of learning and growth is this? and i thought they were brilliant to point at this building and say it is not a great container for learning and growth. >> i am going to go back to the audience because in the words of the great philosopher -- oh, did you? >> i'll try to be brief. but i just want to say that we have so much renaming to do. we have a lot of renaming work that needs to be done. and i think this goes to the fact that we still have such a limited idea of our own history. i mention -- i brought back wilson's line about the wilderness and holding up, you know, the greatness of what the people who first came to north america did to set something up because i want to suggest that

we have to look at native american history, we have to look at african-american experiences. we have so much renaming to do. but i also wanted to say that wilson's desire to hold up the life of america and the purity of america, the question here about what is the pure story we are looking for and will changing the name -- i think there are good reasons to change the name. i'm not disagreeing with that. but if we stop there and think that we have done all right if we just take that name out of that building without looking in a much more thorough going way at the problem, then we're in trouble. i have more to say. >> that is what the university of carolina did with their renaming, right? in very north carolina, they removed white see prupremists a just called it carolina hall. >> i just wanted to add to this. >> david, we're at 10:29, so i

think that people who have not commented on this probably should go and then we have two pink shirts who wanted to ask a question and we'll end with an answer to that question. >> just two quick points. i think as said earlier, the questions about wilson and race are more questions about liberalism and what it means and i think that is what's going on with the naming, right? it's not just about wilson and the name on the wall. it is about society at large. then i think -- and not that you didn't mean this, but we need more renaming and we need more teaching, right? and that's part of the renaming is teaching students and adults. >> i am going to ask y'all to pose your questions and then come to the reception and we'll all work out answers. so you two. >> first of all, race is not simply a domestic issue for

wilson. i think you make a false claim there. that's a global issue. and do boys really to tap into it. this isn't quite the global issue and the treaty of versailles is full of race. it is not just the united states. second, wilson is a presbyterian and none of y'all acknowledged that. but presbyterians normally acknowledge their sin, which princeton has not done and, you know, part of being a presbyterian, which wilson was and defines him. i think gary wills years ago called him the presbyterian riche. it seems to me i've got monuments all around me and they tell me a lot about -- and my grandmother had to live right by the statue of lee, lee circle in

an old folks' home. so i think you speak of wilson in your sense of privilege. i see wilson as a very different kind of person. so y'all acknowledgeds where you are coming from as well. that's a party confessing their sin. thank you. >> i'd like to push back a little bit. i'm elizabeth cogs from texas a&m, and i think we're underestimating woodrow wilson. he spoke for powerful discontinuities from the past and going back to the gentleman's point, i understand that he raised the expectations that therefore led to a lot of disappointment, money might say like lennen did, articulating a vision at great odds with the overall vision that the world had been sort of going along with for many, many centuries. i think we the end to think, oh, he just didn't know that. he said these 14 points. he didn't get the racial implications, he didn't get the

implications for the self-determination for small states like vietnam and i don't think he was that stupid. i'd just like to finish. i think that he -- i think that we the end to think that because he was -- he sides out poland. of course he also talked about the break up of the ottoman empi empire, that that was more discontinuous than continuous with the previous history. and the other thing about -- i recently finished a book on woodrow wilson and women's suffrage. so i think it's interesting that -- by the way, this wasn't the liberal consensus racism. the main ok stbstacle was race. and woodrow wilson came the staun chest probone innocent and

the person who pushed hardest and i don't think he did it because he didn't know, but the self-determination, he did know that this would have down the line consequences for empires all around the world. that this tells us something about wilson. now, he's kind of quiet about it. why is he quiet about the fact that women's suffrage will franchise black women because he knows if he says a word, that there is no way this will pass at all. there is not a sickle person in the u.s. congress who stands up and says, oh, i understand the 15th amendment was okay. there is not one person who defends black suffrage at the time of women's suffrage. so the fact that wilson pushes for that i think tells us something we need to acknowledge more fully than we are and i think we are in this panel about the man. >> the advocacy of social movements and making people do things they don't want to do. one final question. and then we have to go because

it's 10:35. >> who perspective on the panel is the fact that right wingers hate wilson much more than left wingers and without any of this nuance. and i'm sorry. we'll discuss that. >> he's responding more to glen beck more than he's responding to us. >> thank you, everybody. thank you all of you. [ applause ] >> see you at 5:00. >> it resulted in a naval victory for the u.s. over japan, just six months after the attack on pearl harbor. on friday, we will be live from

virginia for the 75th anniversary of the battle of mid-way. featured speerkers include the author of the admirals, the five star admirals who won the war at sea, elliot carlson with his book, the oddsy of a code breaker who outfitted midway. the coauthor of shattered swoshd and the coauthor of never call me a hero. watch the battle of midway 75th anniversary special live from the visitor's center in virginia on friday beginning at 9:30 a.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span 3. >> on sunday, author and journalist matt taibbi will be our guest.

>> one day you see that one face you feel was put on earth just for you, and that's instantly you fall in love in that moment. you know, for me trump was like that, except it was the opposite. when i first saw him on the campaign trail, i thought, you know, this is a person who is unique, horrible and amazing, terrible characteristics were put on effort, you know, specifically for me to appreciate or unappreciate or whatever the verb is. because i had really been spending a lot of last 10 to 12 years without knowing it preparing for donald trump to happen. >> he is a contributor to rolling stone magazine and the author of several books, including "smells like dead elephants," the great derangement, griftopia and his

most recent book, insane clown president, dispatches from the 2016 circus. during our live three-hour conversation, we'll take your calls, tweets and facebook questions on his literary career. watch in-depth with author and journalist matt taibbi live sunday. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's companies. and it is brought to you today by your cable and satellite provider. >> now, more from this year's meeting of the organization of american historians. in this part of the conference, a panel discusses their role